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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • “I UNDERSTAND that one time you saw YOUR MOTHER wearing CLOTHING. The HORROR of it. THE DRAPING FABRIC. THE DELICATE EMBROIDERY. The WAY it BUNCHED UP AROUND HER. I cannot begin to FATHOM how DISGUSTING it must have been for you. TO SEE YOUR MOTHER THERE in CLOTHING. This is not the kind of thing I like to imagine. The FOLDS and GUSSETS and BUTTON HOLES. Imagine your mother PUTTING HER CLOTHING ON, thrusting her STUBBY FINGERS through her BUTTON HOLES as she DRAPES HERSELF IN FABRIC. And when she was done she LOOKED IN A MIRROR…”





  • As a survivor of homeschooling, this is the one thing I wish more people understood: school is not about cramming enough data into a kid until they magically evolve into an adult. School is supposed to teach you how to think.

    Not in an Orwellian sense, but in a “here’s how to approach a problem, here’s how to get the data you need, here’s how to keep track of it all, here’s how to articulate your thoughts, here’s how to ask useful questions…” sense. More broadly, it should also teach you how to handle failure and remind you that you’ll never know everything.

    Abstracting that away, either by giving kids AI crutches or – in my case – the teacher’s textbook and telling them to figure it out, causes a lot of damage once they’re out of the school bubble and have to solve big, knotty problems.








  • groucho@lemmy.sdf.orgtoAutism@lemmy.worldLearning to Cook
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    1 month ago

    Most of the issues I had with cooking are a result of how recipes are. Recipe says dice a thing? How small? A teaspoon of something? The hell does that mean? I can fit a ton of stuff in there if I mash it down. Salt to taste? Forget about it. Pretty soon I’m operating in panic mode and maybe the recipe turns out but I’m too stressed out to enjoy it.

    Enter Sohla’s cookbook, which explains everything. It’s part cookbook, part autobiography, and part reference manual. Her youtube videos are tremendous fun, too.


  • Yeah, the goddamn wooden spoon. I remember being noisy in a crib and my mom storming into the room screaming and busting the spoon in half on the side of the crib. She’d already hit me with it so I knew exactly what it meant. I got spoons, open hand, and hairbrushes for most of my childhood. Hair pulling, pinching, and ear-twisting too if we were in a situation where she couldn’t just haul off and hit me.

    The funny thing is, she called me up about a decade ago and asked if I could remember anything about my childhood that was bad. And rather than list everything off, I told her about the time she broke the spoon on the crib. That’s when I found out that it hadn’t happened at all, and in fact if it had happened it was because the spoon was old and brittle and if she’d done anything at all it would have been a light tap on the side of the crib to get my attention, and now that she remembers it yeah that’s exactly what happened. It just fell apart in her hands. We didn’t talk for a few years because of that and other things.

    After my daughter was born, she sent us a package that included two beautiful olivewood spoons from Israel. I use the fuckers when I’m making pasta. She calls or texts every once in a while warning me about protecting my daughter dark, evil things in the world. This usually happens when she sees a picture of my kid playing with a toy spider or a halloween skull. And I just chuckle and agree that there are dark, evil things in the world and I’m doing my damndest to protect her from them.





  • Yeah I’d argue that creativity starts after the idea, when you roll your sleeves up and see it through to completion. Ideas are easy. Everyone has them. Doing the work by using your skills and tools is the actual creative process. Everything else is mindless ideation.

    Or to put it another way, imagine a high-level executive telling the art department to come up with something cool for the next product line. He fires an email off, waits for the result, maybe sends a couple notes back. When he unveils the product, he says “look how creative and artistic I am.” Is he? I’d argue he isn’t. He just had the idea. Other people executed that idea. The best you can say about him is he guided the process along, but nobody in the art department needs him to be there.